Zero and 335
The significance of nothing
I’m putting together a collection of poetry.
It being impossible to create art that isn’t political during a time of abject crisis - that is, a genocide, to say nothing of a genocide which is being bragged about, openly and indulgently, by those perpetrating it - my work is, necessarily, unavoidably and deliberately, a response to what it is to bear witness to unbearable cruelty and man-made suffering.
As part of the writing process for one poem, I made myself type out, one by one, the numbers from one to 335. Anyone following events in Gaza will understand precisely the significance of this number.
As I did so, I thought of an earlier poem I had written in response to the incident to which each of these now-heavy numbers pertains. This atrocity, at the time that it happened, had just about made it to the headlines of mainstream media. The terms in which it arrived on outlets such as the BBC (as usual) blurred realities, obfuscated responsibilities and failed to apportion blame.
According to the BBC, the girl to whom this number will now forever be linked was, ‘found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help’.[1]
As with other instances (before and after) on which the BBC has failed in its duty to report with impartiality, I complained to the Corporation about their use of language, (the passivity of the phrase ‘found dead’, the deliberate decision not to describe the death as the killing that it was or to name the aggressor, the lack of significant context etc., etc.,). The standard response (to which I was accustomed by this point), infuriated me anew and, led, eventually to my poem, ‘Polarising Matters’, in which I noted, cynically:
‘It’s Polarising that there were
335
opportunities
not to pull the trigger.’
This week, working on another poem, I looked again at the list of numbers I had typed out from one to three hundred and thirty five. And I wondered about Zero.
There should of course, have been the possibility of zero.
But the number Zero has no position in the list of the number of bullets being fired by Israeli soldiers from the protection of a military vehicle (likely an Israeli Merkava tank[2]) at six-year-old Hind Rajab on 29 January 2024 when she was trapped in car surrounded by the dead bodies of her relatives.
And the significance of this seems apt, if incredibly painful.
That is: to not fire bullets was a non-option for colonisers intent on destroying a six-year-old Palestinian child.
There is a cruel irony in this.
When the Crusaders pillaged Western Asia back in the Eleventh Century they were introduced to the concept of Zero, which had been in use mathematically in India and West Asia for millennia. Naturally, as xenophobes who just wanted to exploit the lands to which they travelled, they rejected the concept outright, along with pretty much any Arab or Muslim ideas. At its most extreme, this meant that Zero was banned in Florence in 1299 and it was not until the fifteenth century that the mathematical concept of Zero was finally accepted.
Poor Zero: the circle that exists not around nothing but around everything: the ring that represents eternity, the circle of life. The Western Colonisers of the early second millennia AD rejected it outright – the possibility it introduced of negative numbers and therefore debt – was too complicated. So they continued clunking around with Roman Numerals for a couple of hundred years until they realised they could not manage without it and – in true colonial style – realising it was pretty much fundamental to higher level Mathematics, adopted it as their own without much recognition of its original conception.
And just like in the study of Mathematics, the possibility of Nothing would very definitely have been Something for Hind Rajab. It would have been Something not to pull the trigger once. It would have been Something for the Israeli soldiers not to pull the trigger twice. It would have been Something multiplied by 335 not to have pulled the trigger 335 times.
Just as in the thousands upon thousands of instances in which Israeli soldiers have picked up a gun, Zero really would have been Something on 29 January 2014: Zero bullets would have been the life of a child.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68261286
[2] https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab